The Phenomenological Circle and the Unity of Life and Thought
George E. Atwood, Ph.D. and Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D.
It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has heretofore been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.—Friedrich Nietzsche
I work concretely and factically out of my ‘I am,’ out of my intellectual and wholly factic origin, milieu, life-contexts, and whatever is available to me from these as a vital experience in which I live.—Martin Heidegger
In what follows, we tell the story of two love affairs with philosophy: first, George Atwood's, and second, Robert Stolorow's. We also describe the interaction of our respective philosophical journeys in our collaborative studies over the last four decades. Our goal in giving this account is to reflect on the deepest assumptions of the phenomenological-contextualist theory to which our shared efforts have led us. Again and again we have been led to the inseparability of theoretical thought and the life in which it emerges.
1. George Atwood
I found philosophy at the age of 16 when I ran across a little book on pragmatism, a work that summarized aspects of the thinking of William James, Charles Sanders Pierce, and John Dewey. I cannot say that I found the ideas in this book terribly exciting in themselves, but I was able to understand them well enough, and there was something about the nature of the thinking described that was utterly entrancing to my young mind. I had discovered philosophy, a field of thought that seemed to be devoted to searching for the ultimate meaning of life and for the universal principles according to which one can and should live. It had not previously occurred to me that such an interesting realm of study even existed.
This first impression became more complex a year later as I began my undergraduate education at the University of Arizona and enrolled in a course in the history of philosophy. I saw to my astonishment that there were whole territories of questions with which philosophers occupied themselves, interesting questions about the nature of reality, the process of knowing, good and evil, mind and body, about the nature of the beautiful, of meaning, of freedom, of truth, and of being itself. The pull was very strong to embrace this incredible discipline, but I was also drawn in a different direction in these early years of my academic studies: toward psychiatry as a career. Concurrently with encountering philosophy, I also discovered psychoanalysis, in the works of Freud and Jung, and was so taken with their discoveries and theories that I decided to follow in their footsteps. This meant undergoing medical training, as they had, then a residency in psychiatry, and eventually becoming a psychotherapist and, I hoped, a theorist of human nature. What career, I asked, could possibly be as good or as interesting? I could dwell for a lifetime in the study of dreams and their symbolism, investigating madness in its many forms and variations, researching the mysteries of human psychological development. Psychoanalysis appeared to me to be a window into the human soul, one that had just begun to be opened by the great theorists of the field. There was a vast country coming into view, and I was to become one of its explorers, a discoverer of continents unknown. And in such exploration, it seemed possible that one might run across the foundational constituents of human nature.
The premedical program at my college was very demanding, and after a few courses I ran into a wall: Organic Chemistry. Picture the following scene: An intensely unhappy 18 year-old George Atwood, in his second semester of this course, clad in a smock and wearing protective goggles, holes in his trousers from an earlier acid spill, utterly exhausted and heavily perspiring, holding up a test tube filled with a foul-smelling black goo. This was the product of 12 consecutive hours of effort to synthesize an organic compound in a process that should have only required perhaps 2 hours. I have forgotten what the target compound was, but it was supposed to appear as a beautiful, light purple powder. And what had I created? Black, stinking goo. It was not the first time my laboratory exercises had ended in such a mess. Words came into my consciousness: I just ain’t cut out for this. Looking ahead to other difficult courses - in biochemistry, physiology, anatomy, and then medical school to be followed by an internship - I shuddered at the thought of the many years of toil that would have to be survived, studying things at a great remove from what had inspired me. So I opted for psychology as a major area of study instead. I imagined psychoanalysis to be a central part of the discipline of psychology, and additionally it seemed to me that psychology overlapped substantially with my beloved philosophy.
Following the path of my subsequent education, undergraduate and graduate, presented new difficulties. The programs at the University of Arizona and subsequently at the University of Oregon were unsympathetic to psychoanalysis and very distant from philosophy, promoting instead behaviorist theories and methods, and insisting on quantitative empirical research. I continued my psychoanalytic education on a separate basis nevertheless, by purchasing and reading the complete works of Freud and Jung, and by collecting and studying major writings of other psychoanalytic theorists as well. Gazing back in time, I see how hard I was trying to somehow fit my psychoanalytic and philosophical interests into the prevailing paradigm of empirical research. My first publication, still as an undergraduate, was a quantitative experiment dealing with the existential philosophical theme of mortality anxiety: “Anxiety and two forms of cognitive resistance to the idea of death” (Golding, Atwood, & Goodman, 1965).
The explorations in philosophy proper also continued. One of my last undergraduate courses, taken in 1965, was in existentialism, and the readings for this course included selections from the book Existence (May, Angel & Ellenberger, 1958). The essays by Rollo May and even more one by Ludwig Binswanger led me then to Martin Heidegger’s (1927) Being and Time. I found Heidegger’s masterwork exceptionally difficult to understand but endlessly fascinating, and I kept a copy of his book at my bedside, for years reading short passages from it almost every night. When I was unable to sleep, I would open it to any random page and peruse the long, often incomprehensible sentences. I also read widely in other philosophers, some of my favorites being Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, and Jean-Paul Sartre. I recall standing for long hours in the stacks of the University of Oregon library reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1945) Phenomenology of Perception, another book that was intriguing but extremely dense and difficult to follow.
Something happened to my mind in consequence of these philosophical readings, especially those in phenomenology. Looking back, it seems to me that this early exposure awakened me from my Cartesian trance. Formerly, without any explicit awareness, I had believed in the existence of the mind, in there being an inner mental life that somehow was separate from a surrounding outer world. I thought people had minds, and that I possessed one too. I remember arguments, some of them heated, with fellow students as I began to question the existence of an “inner world” that exists separately from “external reality.” One of these, a woman with whom I had become personally involved, told me that to question the existence of mind – of an inner mental life that stands apart from the outer world - is like denying that the sun rises in the morning. The thought came to me that her personal reality was split between external and internal, perhaps somehow by trauma, and that she was universalizing her own psychological division by assuming its presence as a given in everyone’s life. Our discussions broke down at this point, as did our personal relationship not long thereafter. In the meantime I had begun to think that there is no such thing as the mind; there is just experience, just consciousness, just the subjective, which is neither internal nor external.
In the meantime I continued to adapt to my academic program, conducting experiments as required, and finally completed a doctoral degree. What followed was a post-doctoral fellowship in clinical psychology at the Western Missouri Mental Health Center in Kansas City, under the guiding supervision of Austin Des Lauriers, the author of The Experience of Reality in Childhood Schizophrenia (1964). Des Lauriers was my first great mentor figure, and he was a phenomenologist. His theory of the central disturbance constituting so-called schizophrenia was that it involves a loss of reality experience, i.e., a loss of the sense that anything is real, substantial, enduring, and a consequent devastation of the experience of selfhood as it loses its boundaries, cohesion, and continuity in time.
My postdoctoral years, occupied primarily with working on an inpatient service for very severe psychiatric disorders, were decisive in shaping my destiny as a clinician and as a theorist. I gave myself unreservedly to the work, spending up to 70 hours a week at the hospital, getting to know a great many of the patients not formally assigned to me and taking voluminous notes on all my experiences. Under my mentor’s influence, I tried to focus on understanding the patients I met phenomenologically, in terms of what their experiences were as best I could make them out. Some of these experiences I had never encountered before, and when I tried to find sense in what was being said to me in terms of the many theories I had studied, I got nowhere. I recall hearing from a number of people, for example, that the world had come to an end and that they were dead rather than alive. How, I wondered, would Freud, or Jung, or Sullivan, or any of a whole range of other theorists interpret such expressions? The regular psychiatric staff members at the hospital viewed these statements as delusional, as symptoms of an underlying psychosis that was causing the patients to lose contact with the objectively real. This way of thinking seemed utterly, woefully inadequate. I met other patients who made the claim to be God, to be the savior of the universe, and still others who told me that I was God and had the power to set all things in the world straight and right. I had an event occur on the very first day of my postdoctoral work that set me reeling: as I walked out of the elevator and on to the floor where the patients were housed, a very tall and heavy bipolar patient threw herself upon me and attempted to engage in sexual intercourse. One of the first to tell me she was dead, as we sat in an office for our interview, lit a cigarette I gave her and pressed its burning tip into the flesh on her arm as she looked into my eyes and smiled warmly. I remember another young man I met in this very early period who was silent for long periods, not responding to my queries and not looking at me as I tried to engage him – finally he spoke, saying that he was hearing a voice saying “Kill Dr. Atwood.” A woman, 60 years old, was brought to the hospital by the Secret Service after attempting to break into the home of ex-President Harry Truman, then still alive and residing nearby. She said that she had traveled to his home to retrieve her head, which had been stolen from her and placed under his control as part of a terrible conspiracy. A young woman I eventually worked closely with for many years introduced herself to me one evening with the claim that she had just experienced sexual intercourse with Jesus Christ. It was like that – case after case, one incomprehensible story after another, one strange pattern of behavior followed by another one, and all with no explanations and nothing in my background to help me begin to know what it was I was seeing. Although I had earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, I saw that I knew nothing and had to forget all I had learned in my so-called education and start over again, from scratch. I recognized that the nurses and the aides and even the cleaning staff at the hospital, those who pushed the brooms and took care of the laundry, were way ahead of me. They had seen and known these patients for years, and were on familiar terms with things that I was encountering for the very first time in my life.
My appreciation of phenomenology increased dramatically because of these and other such continuing challenging experiences. Phenomenology itself is always trying to start over again, to find the requisite starting point from which to approach the task of describing and understanding subjectivity. With sustaining support from Austin Des Lauriers, it became possible to embrace the task of my own new beginning, with the goal of discovering the meaning of the many forms of madness by which I was confronted. How did I know there were meanings there to be found? In accord with the entire enterprise of psychoanalytic theory, I made the assumption that this was so, and went on from there.
From my point of view now, gazing back in time, I think I understand an important part of my difficulty in applying the psychoanalytic concepts I had studied. I did not know it at the time, but it was because of a profound disjunction between the philosophical assumptions underlying the theoretical systems I was trying to use, and the nature of the extreme psychological disturbances with which I was beginning to engage. Here is how I put it in a paper, coauthored by my colleagues Robert Stolorow and Donna Orange, some 30 years later.
“…the experiences that characterize these psychological disturbances tend to cluster around themes of personal annihilation and the destruction of the world. Such experiences occur outside the horizons of Cartesian systems of thought, which rest upon a vision of the mind as an isolated existent that stands in relation to a stable, external reality. The Cartesian image of mind, rigidly separating an internal mental subject from an externally real object, reifies and universalizes a very specific pattern of experience, centering around an enduringly stable sense of personal selfhood that is felt as distinct and separate from a world outside. Experiences of extreme self-loss and the disintegration of the world cannot be conceptualized within such an ontology of mind, because they dissolve the very structures this ontology posits as universally constitutive of personal existence” (Atwood, Orange, & Stolorow, 2002, p. 144).
In the early years I am describing, I was unable to articulate any of this and certainly could not theoretically conceptualize my patients’ psychological situations; but I found it possible nevertheless to relate to them on a practical level and discuss with them all they were undergoing. When people told me they were dead because someone had drained their bodies of all their blood, I heard what had been said not as delusion but just as experience, one of infinite devitalization. Similarly, if I was told that I possessed godlike powers, I believed this was what was being felt - George Atwood, creating (and perhaps destroying) personal universes. When someone explained to me that his wife and child had been replaced by persecuting duplicates, I did not pronounce his thoughts to be insane. Instead I just listened to him, and wondered about the overall calamity that had befallen him, when his most intimate family members could no longer be relied upon even to be themselves. If I met a person whose body was covered with scars from years and even decades of self-cutting, I did not diagnose the presence of so-called borderline personality disorder. Instead I tried to decipher the messages to the world that the scars from the cuts were trying to send forth. In other words, I was searching for a human understanding of each and every patient I met, and simultaneously for a set of guiding ideas to draw upon to support that search.
There was one indelible impression I took away from my postdoctoral years. It concerned the healing power of psychotherapy in the most severe psychological disturbances. Working intensively with a number of patients, guided by indispensable consultations with Des Lauriers, I saw with my own eyes dramatic recoveries from chronic mental illnesses arising out of a human intervention. Such experiences laid the foundation for a deep optimism that I have brought to all my subsequent clinical work.
2. Robert Stolorow
I first touched on the edges of philosophy at the age of 13 when I read a book on the life and work of Albert Einstein, which eventually became the topic of my high school senior thesis. Foreshadowing my later career as a subversive thinker, I scandalized the congregation with my Bar Mitzvah sermon on Einstein’s conception of God as an impersonal principle of order in the universe.
Influenced by my father’s admiration of philosophy, as an undergraduate at Harvard I eagerly took courses in Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Ethics, Augustine’s Confessions, aesthetics, and intellectual history. A nodal point occurred when, in Gordon Allport’s course in personality psychology, I encountered Rollo May’s book, Existence. Like George, I became fascinated with the thought of Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Binswanger.
Despite my interest in philosophy, I formed an interest in doing hard-science research in psychopathology and decided that the best path toward that ambition was medical school and psychiatry. I enrolled at Cornell Medical School in the fall of 1964, but I was a very unhappy camper there and dropped out after 5 weeks, deciding that the most appropriate path for my goal was doctoral studies in clinical psychology, which I pursued back at Harvard the next year. Paralleling George’s disaster in organic chemistry lab, my own performance in anatomy lab was so atrocious that I think it is safe to say that many lives have been saved as a result of taking a scalpel out of my hands. The year before beginning graduate work at Harvard proved pivotal, as I enrolled in a course at the New School on existential psychology given by Rollo May. I was entranced by May’s lectures on phenomenology and existential philosophy—the works of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. I also read May’s (1950) book, The Meaning of Anxiety, which introduced me to the concept of ontological anxiety, a concept that was to become very important to me in later years. The following year in a seminar given by Robert White I wrote a term paper exploring the anxiety-defense process from three perspectives—the intrapsychic, the interpersonal, and the ontological—which became my first published article (Stolorow, 1969).
As a doctoral student in clinical psychology I soon became disillusioned with empirical psychological research, feeling that it stripped psychology of everything humanly meaningful. I contacted a former undergraduate professor, Henry Aiken, then at Brandeis University, and proposed doing a second doctorate in philosophy, with an eye toward using phenomenology and existential philosophy to clean up the mess of psychoanalytic theory. Aiken was enthusiastic about my proposal, but during my subsequent clinical internship I found that I really enjoyed psychoanalytic work and, after completing my doctorate in psychology, I decided to go to New York to pursue psychoanalytic training instead. My idea of pursuing doctoral studies in philosophy had to await several decades before coming to fruition.
Like George, I early on became interested in the phenomenological underpinnings of clinical phenomena. Drawing on David Shapiro’s (1965) concept of neurotic styles, my doctoral dissertation examined the differing causality-intepretations characteristic of obsessive versus hysterical styles, with the former showing an exaggerated sense and the latter an attenuated sense of personal causation. In my first year of psychoanalytic training I published a brief article, “Mythic Consonance and Dissonance in the Vicissitudes of Transference” (Stolorow, 1970), exploring the impact on the therapeutic relationship of correspondences and discrepancies between the causality-interpretations of patient and therapist. This early article anticipated our later conception of the therapeutic relationship as an intersubjective system. Two years later I published another brief article whose title explicitly named phenomenology—“On the Phenomenology of Anger and Hate” (Stolorow, 1972), exploring how the experience of these emotions differs depending on whether forgiveness is felt to be a possibility.
Early in my psychoanalytic training I also became interested in Heinz Kohut’s (1966, 1968) work on narcissism and the treatment of narcissistic disorders. It seemed to me that hidden within Kohut’s obscure drive-theoretical language—the language of the Freudian orthodoxy against which I was already in vigorous rebellion—were important insights into the relationships that either fostered or undermined the senses of self-cohesion, self-continuity, and self-esteem. What was crystallizing for me here was a focus on emotional phenomenology and its intersubjective contexts, which would soon become the joint preoccupation of our collaborative work. Foreshadowing my later preoccupation with emotional trauma and efforts to rethink the concept of the unconscious, my first psychoanalytic control case was a very successful treatment of a woman whose sense of self had been massively damaged by her ways of denying an early devastating traumatic loss.
……….
By the time we met at Rutgers in 1972 and began our long collaborative dialogue, we had arrived at similar positions of profound dissatisfaction with the prevailing frameworks of our field and their official languages—those of traditional diagnostic psychiatry in the case of George and that of Freudian metapsychology in that of my own. In each instance, the prevailing framework and language seemed to alienate us from the very experiences we wished to engage and understand. We each sensed the need for a framework that was always and only about emotional experience and how it came to be shaped. We were ripe for a collaborative effort at creating a psychoanalytic phenomenology.
3. George Atwood
Robert Stolorow and I met in the spring of 1972, when he was offered a faculty position at Rutgers University. At the time, an effort was being made to assemble a group of scholars at Rutgers, under the leadership of Silvan Tomkins, to resurrect the personological tradition in psychology that originally had been associated with Henry Murray at Harvard University. This tradition is defined by its central methodology: the intensive, in-depth case study, providing an alternative to the emphasis of academic psychology on quantification and objective empirical research. I called Bob and urged him to accept the offer that had been made, telling him he would be insane to go anywhere else. I told him that in our working together there was the possibility of significant advances in the sort of personality theory to which both of us were already deeply committed. He accepted the offer and our collaboration began.
There were many wonderful lunchtime conversations over cheeseburgers and endless cups of coffee in the first and second years of our relationship. We discussed anything and everything about personality psychology – its past, present, and future. In one of these early talks, as I recall it – now more than 4 decades later – a question was posed: “What is the most important problem facing the field of personality theory today?” One of us – I no longer remember which one -- offered a succinct answer: “That would be the problem of understanding the dimensionalization of a person’s experiential world.” The use of the term world reflected already our shared background and interest in existential phenomenology and foreshadowed much that was to come in the many years of our work that followed. The word dimensionalization in this phrasing, influenced to some degree by the thinking of Silvan Tomkins, was intended to capture the idea that every person’s world has its own unique emotional geometry, rendered visible in repeating, invariant patterns of experience and conduct.
In another of these initial conversations, an idea was floated bearing similarity to the one just described. We were talking about Bob’s psychoanalytic training in New York City at the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health, then in its final stages. The role of the so-called structural model in that training came up in our discussion, the tripartite division of the mind into ego, id, and superego. I remember Bob describing how this conceptualization had been taught as if “this is just the way human beings come packaged;” in other words, as a universally valid description of the mind. I responded: “Perhaps though the tripartite model is not universal but is just a symbol, one that points to an important but still particular class of conflictual experiential states.” Implicit here was an incompletely developed intuition that some personal worlds of emotional experience might be organized or structured along the Freudian lines, but that very different models of he mind might apply to other such worlds. We were beginning to imagine the existence of a wide range of variations and were also starting to see that different schools of thought in psychoanalytic personality theory somehow corresponded to these differing variations. What was not apparent, however, was how to move toward a more comprehensive psychoanalytic phenomenology, a more general framework addressing personal worlds in all their diversity, richness, and idiosyncrasy.
Soon thereafter, however, an approach to this problem opened up to us, in our collaborative studies of the subjectivity of personality theory. We saw that each of the classic schools of psychoanalytic thought had its own central affective theme, and that this theme was also the organizing emotional dimension of the theorist’s personal world. An analysis of the personal subjectivity of these various frameworks we began to recognize opened a pathway to a more general point of view: in Bob’s words, “a movement from studies of the subjectivity of theory to a theory of subjectivity itself.“ Our first book, Faces in a Cloud: Subjectivity in Personality Theory (Stolorow & Atwood, 1979) was an effort to follow this pathway and reach toward an embracing psychoanalytic phenomenology.
4. Robert Stolorow
In these early years of our collaboration the philosophy that attracted my interest largely took the form of George S. Klein’s brilliant work on the nature of psychoanalytic theory. Klein (1976) claimed that Freud’s psychoanalytic theory actually amalgamates two theories—a metapsychology and a clinical theory—deriving from two different universes of discourse. Metapsychology (which we eventually recognized as a form of metaphysics) deals with the material substrate of experience and is couched in the natural science framework of impersonal structures, forces, and energies. Clinical theory, by contrast, deals with intentionality and the unconscious meanings of personal experience, seen from the perspective of the individual’s unique life history. Clinical psychoanalysis asks “why” questions and seeks answers in terms of personal reasons, purposes, and individual meanings. Metapsychology asks “how” questions and seeks answers in terms of the nonexperiential realm of impersonal mechanisms and causes. Klein sought to disentangle metapsychological and clinical concepts, retaining only the latter as the legitimate content of psychoanalytic theory. For Klein, the essential psychoanalytic enterprise involves the reading of disclaimed intentionality and the unlocking of unconscious meanings from a person’s experience, a task for which the concepts of the clinical theory, purged of metapsychological contaminants, are uniquely suited.
Although Klein did not chronicle the philosophical traditions that informed his proposal for a radical “theorectomy” for psychoanalysis, he had unveiled its clinical essence as a hermeneutic phenomenology devoted to the investigation of the meanings that unconsciously shape experiential life. I was so taken with his proposal that I agreed to review an anthology of articles about it for Contemporary Psychology (Stolorow, 1976). Much more important for the evolution of our own theoretical framework, I wrote an article, “The Concept of Psychic Structure: Its Metapsychological and Clinical Psychoanalytic Meanings” (Stolorow, 1978), applying Klein’s distinction to the psychoanalytic concept of psychological structure. I suggested that, in contrast to metapsychological structures like id, ego, and superego, in its clinical psychoanalytic meanings psychological structure denotes the principles that prereflecively organize an experiential world. With this conception of psychological structure, psychoanalysis became a form of inquiry explicitly rooted in the tradition of Continental phenomenology, investigating prereflective structures of experience.
5. George Atwood and Robert Stolorow
Our second book, Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology (Atwood & Stolorow, 1984), included 3 developments in our ever-evolving interaction with philosophy. First, we offered a more detailed explication of our own philosophical premises in fashioning a phenomenological reconceptualization of psychoanalytic theory.
“The point of departure of psychoanalytic phenomenology is the concept of [the person as] an experiencing subject. This means that at the deepest level of our theoretical constructionso we are operating within a sphere of subjectivity, abjuring assumptions that reduce experience to a material substrate. The material world, from our standpoint, is regarded as a domain of experience, and the concepts of natural science are understood as modes of organizing that domain of experience. This is in contrast to a theoretical [and philosophical] position that would assign ontological priority to physical matter and interpret human consciousness as a secondary expression of material events. The development of knowledge in the sciences of nature involves the organizing and interconnecting of human observations, which are experiences; but materialism is a doctrine based on reifying the concepts of natural science and then seeing consciousness as an epiphenomenon of those reifications” (Atwood & Stolorow, 1984, p. 7)
The second development in our relationship with philosophy occurring at the time appeared in a systematic comparison of our emerging ideas with those of 3 great phenomenologists: Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Although we were still picturing psychoanalytic investigation as distinct from philosophical inquiry, we sought to define the essential similarities and differences of philosophical and psychoanalytic phenomenology.
“Each of the 3 phenomenological systems reviewed … is a proposal concerning the assumptions underlying the study of human experience. These proposals have in common an emphasis on differentiating between the properties of material objects in the world of experience and the properties of subjectivity itself. This same emphasis has been of growing importance in recent psychoanalytic thought, specifically in the critique of Freudian metapsychology. It seems to us that this agreement establishes the possibility of an integration of phenomenological insight into psychoanalysis” (Atwood & Stolorow, 1984, p. 30).
We noted two obstacles to such integration: the commitment of analysts to a vision of their field modeled on the sciences of material nature, enshrined in the metaphorical language of classical metapsychology, picturing mental life in terms of forces, energies, and mechanisms; and an insufficiently critical attitude toward the phenomenological philosophers themselves.
“Many exceptional thinkers have tried to restructure the assumptions of psychoanalysis along phenomenological lines (e.g., Binswanger, 1963; Boss, 1963, 1979; May, Angel, & Ellenberger, 1958). We are in sympathy with such reformulations, insofar as their aim has been to free the phenomenological knowledge of psychoanalysis from its procrustean bed of mechanism and determinism” (Atwood & Stolorow, 1984, p. 31).
Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss, for example, were two early pioneers who saw the value of Heidegger’s analysis of existence for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. They both proceeded “from the top down”—that is, they started with Heidegger’s philosophical delineation of essential existential structures and applied these to clinical phenomena and the therapeutic situation. Although Binswanger’s (1946) existential analysis produced some brilliant phenomenological descriptions of the “world-designs” (p. 195) underlying various forms of psychopathology, and Boss’s (1963) Daseinanalysis freed the psychoanalytic theory of therapy from the dehumanizing causal-mechanistic assumptions of Freudian metapsychology, neither effort brought about a radicalization of psychoanalytic practice itself or of the psychoanalytic process. The evolution of our own psychoanalytic perspective, by contrast, proceeded “from the bottom up.” It was born of our studies of the subjective origins of psychoanalytic theories and developed out of our concurrent efforts to rethink psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry and to illuminate the phenomenology of the psychoanalytic process itself.
This relates to the third of the developments in our understanding of the relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy. The proposals of philosophical phenomenology, we came to realize, arise out of the solitary reflections of individual persons and inevitably embody a particularization of scope associated with the philosopher’s personal subjectivity. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein, and Sartre’s dialectic of being and nothingness each carry the unmistakable signature of its creator’s unique personality. The philosophical systems have a metaphysical-ontological core, and as we had shown to be the case in our studies of the personality theorists in Faces in a Cloud, this universalizing core reflects and symbolizes the issues and struggles of the philosopher’s personal existence. Analyzing the philosophical thinking in its individual subjective context seemed to be of assistance in clarifying the limits to generality of the philosophical ideas as foundational for a science of experience, and thus in pointing beyond their particular horizons of applicability. We were beginning to see the rich potential of what later we called “the reciprocity between the philosophy of psychoanalysis and the psychoanalysis of philosophy” (Atwood, Stolorow, & Orange, 2011).
6. George Atwood
Commencing in 1980, I taught a seminar for college seniors at Rutgers University entitled Madness and Creative Genius. This class continued to be offered over a period of 24 years. Each year my students and I selected a figure from philosophy, literature, or psychology, who engaged in works of great creativity but whose life also showed signs of madness. Our goal in each instance was to understand the relationship between the madness and the genius. Among the many creators we studied were Carl Gustav Jung, Sylvia Plath, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, Jacques Derrida, Heinz Kohut, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Each study involved an immersion in the most important works of the figure selected and a sustained collaborative effort to relate the major themes of his or her writings to the context of the creator’s life history. I regard the influence of these absorbing explorations on my own thinking to have been profound, opening my mind to an ever-expanding and deepening knowledge of creativity and its richly varied linkages to the psychological catastrophes that may occur in a human life. Unexpectedly, my ongoing clinical practice as a psychotherapist interacted powerfully with the research conducted in my seminars. Again and again I found that what I was learning in my practice working with very severe emotional disturbances was applicable to the studies of the geniuses; correspondingly, insights achieved in the analyses of the creators I discovered helped me in understanding my most challenging patients (Atwood, 2012).
All of these intellectual journeys were of importance, but possibly the most transforming for me personally and for the continuing shared work with Bob were the studies of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Sartre. In 2002 we had discussions about the significance of an understanding of these philosophers for our own continuing efforts to formulate a psychoanalytic phenomenology. Over the decade of the 1990s, we had become aware of the pervasiveness of the doctrine of the Cartesian isolated mind in psychoanalysis. We took the view that this doctrine was a modern myth (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992), to be overcome by an increasingly radical phenomenological-contextualist way of thinking about the nature of psychoanalytic theory and therapy. The particular philosophers just listed were, like us, rebels against Descartes, and we knew we had already been drawing on their thought in our own efforts across the years. An idea came to us that a way of further advancing our own understanding would be to examine these post-Cartesian geniuses psychologically and to identify the personal sources and meanings of their various departures from the Cartesian legacy. It seemed to us that we might use their personal life journeys as a distant mirror in which we could glimpse the meanings of our own passionate quest for a truly post-Cartesian psychoanalysis.
For a decade or more we tossed around the possibility of such a project and finally it came together in our paper, “The Madness and Genius of Post-Cartesian Philosophy: A Distant Mirror” (Atwood, Stolorow, & Orange, 2011). Drawing on the discoveries that occurred in my seminar, and on years of intensive discussions between us that also included Donna Orange and a collaborative investigation of Heidegger’s fall into Nazism (Stolorow, Atwood, & Orange, 2010), here is what we found.
“Each [of the post-Cartesian philosophers] suffered extreme trauma in his personal world, eventuating in a lifelong struggle with profound inner conflict. Their thinking, in addition to being brilliant and innovative, also in each instance embodied an effort to master or otherwise come to terms with persistent emotional tensions presenting the danger of fragmentation. We found madness in the genius of their works, arising from the tragic, disintegrating, and even annihilating conditions dominating their life histories. There were personal demons with which they fought, often ambivalently and with uneven success, and the intellectual journeys for which they are famous dramatically reflect and symbolize their efforts to bring themselves together and emotionally survive” (Atwood & Stolorow, 2014, p. 111; see also Atwood, 1983).
Gazing into the mirror of the philosophers’ life histories, we were then led to reflections on our own demons, on the personal contexts and sources of our interests in developing an embracing phenomenological contextualism.
“Perhaps not surprisingly, we saw more clearly the power of trauma in each of our lives, including experiences of shattering loss, of tyrannical invalidation, and personal fragmentation. We also began to recognize all the ways that intersubjectivity theory constituted a kind of answer to the events and circumstances that had been most difficult. The theory that is our Holy Grail … seeks victory over demonic forces that tear us away from ourselves and each other, that confront us with crushing definitions of who we are and should be, and that threaten the survival of our very subjectivity as experiencing persons” (Atwood & Stolorow, 2014, p. 111).
7. Robert Stolorow
My studies in Continental phenomenology, along with further developments of my psychoanalytic perspective, were spurred by terrible personal tragedy.
When the book Contexts of Being (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992) was first published, an initial batch of copies was sent "hot‑off‑the‑press" to the display table at a conference where I was a panelist. I picked up a copy and looked around excitedly for my late wife, Dede, who would be so pleased and happy to see it. She was, of course, nowhere to be found, having died some 20 months earlier. I had awakened one morning to find her lying dead across our bed, four weeks after her metastatic cancer had been diagnosed. I spent the remainder of that conference in 1992 remembering and grieving, consumed with feelings of horror and sorrow over what had happened to Dede and to me.
There was a dinner at that conference for all the panelists, many of whom were my old and good friends and close colleagues. Yet, as I looked around the ballroom, they all seemed like strange and alien beings to me. Or more accurately, I seemed like a strange and alien being--not of this world. The others seemed so vitalized, engaged with one another in a lively manner. I, in contrast, felt deadened and broken, a shell of the man I had once been. An unbridgeable gulf seemed to open up, separating me forever from my friends and colleagues. They could never even begin to fathom my experience, I thought to myself, because we now lived in altogether different worlds.
Over the course of six years following that painful occasion, I tried to understand and conceptualize the dreadful sense of estrangement and isolation that seemed to me to be inherent to the experience of emotional trauma. I became aware that this sense of alienation and aloneness appears as a common theme in the trauma literature, and I was able to hear about it from many of my patients who had experienced severe traumatization. One such young man, who had suffered multiple losses of beloved family members during his childhood and adulthood, told me that the world was divided into two groups‑‑the normals and the traumatized ones. There was no possibility, he said, for a normal ever to grasp the experience of a traumatized one. I remembered how important it had been to me to believe that the analyst I saw after Dede’s death was also a person who had known devastating loss, and how I implored her not to say anything that could disabuse me of my belief.
How was this experiential chasm separating the traumatized person from other human beings to be understood? In the chapter on trauma that I had written for Contexts of Being, I contended that the essence of emotional trauma lay in the experience of unbearable affect and that, developmentally, such intolerability is constituted within an intersubjective system characterized by massive malattunement to the child’s emotional pain. In my experience, this conceptualization of developmental trauma as a relational process involving malattunement to painful affect has proven to be of enormous clinical value in the treatment of traumatized patients. Yet, as I began to recognize at that conference dinner, this formulation fails to distinguish between an attunement that cannot be supplied by others and an attunement that cannot be felt by the traumatized person, because of the profound sense of singularity that seemed to me to be built in to the experience of trauma itself. A beginning comprehension of this isolating estrangement came from an unexpected source: the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose work I had begun to read.
Concerned as it is with the nature of understanding, philosophical hermeneutics has immediate relevance for the profound despair about having one’s experience understood that lies at the heart of emotional trauma. Axiomatic for Gadamer (1975) is the proposition that all understanding involves interpretation. Interpretation, in turn, can only be from a perspective embedded in the historical matrix of the interpreter’s own traditions. Understanding, therefore, is always from a perspective whose horizons are delimited by the historicity of the interpreter’s organizing principles, by the fabric of preconceptions that Gadamer calls prejudice. Gadamer illustrates his hermeneutical philosophy by applying it to the anthropological problem of attempting to understand an alien culture in which the forms of social life, the horizons of experience, are incommensurable with those of the investigator.
At some point while studying Gadamer’s work, I recalled my feeling at the conference dinner as though I were an alien to the normals around me. The two “hermeneutical situations” seemed analogous to me: I felt as though I lived in a world alien to that of my friends and colleagues. In Gadamer’s terms, I felt certain that the horizons of their experience could never encompass mine, and this conviction was the source of my alienation and solitude, of the unbridgeable gulf that I believed separated me from their understanding. It is not just that the traumatized ones and the normals live in different worlds, I thought; it is that these discrepant worlds are felt by the traumatized person to be essentially and ineradicably incommensurable.
Some six years after the conference dinner I heard something in a lecture delivered by George that helped me to comprehend further the nature of this felt incommensurability. In the course of discussing the clinical implications of an intersubjective contextualism from which Cartesian objectivism had been expunged, George offered a nonobjectivist, dialogic definition of psychotic delusions: "Delusions are ideas whose validity is not open for discussion.” This definition fit well with a proposal we had made a dozen years earlier that, when a child's perceptual and emotional experiences meet with massive and consistent invalidation, then his or her belief in the reality of such experiences will remain unsteady and vulnerable to dissolution, and further, that under such predisposing circumstances delusional ideas may develop that “serve to dramatize and reify [an] endangered psychic reality ... restoring [the] vanishing belief in its validity" (Stolorow, Brandchaft, & Atwood, 1987, p. 133). Delusional ideas were understood as a form of absolutism--a radical decontextualization serving vital restorative and defensive functions. Experiences that are insulated from dialogue cannot be challenged or invalidated.
After hearing George's presentation, I began to think about the role such absolutisms unconsciously play in everyday life. When a person says to a friend, "I'll see you later,” or a parent says to a child at bedtime, "I'll see you in the morning,” these are statements, like delusions, whose validity is not open for discussion. Such absolutisms are the basis for a kind of naive realism and optimism that allow one to function in the world, experienced as stable, predictable, and safe. It is in the essence of emotional trauma, I concluded, that it shatters these absolutisms, a catastrophic loss of innocence that permanently alters one's sense of being‑in‑the‑world. Massive deconstruction of the absolutisms of everyday life exposes the inescapable contingency of existence on a universe that is chaotic and unpredictable and in which no safety or continuity of being can be assured. Trauma thereby exposes “the unbearable embeddedness of being" (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992, p. 22). As a result, the traumatized person cannot help but perceive aspects of existence that lie well outside the absolutized horizons of normal everydayness. It is in this sense that the worlds of traumatized persons are felt to be fundamentally incommensurable with those of others, the deep chasm in which an anguished sense of estrangement and solitude takes form.
Motivated in part by how beneficial Gadamer’s work had been for understanding my traumatized state, I turned at this point to more systematic studies of philosophical texts. In the year 2000 I formed a leaderless philosophical reading group that ran for two years, the first of which was devoted to a close reading of Heidegger’s (1927) Being and Time. This study of Heidegger proved to be pivotal for me.
Being and Time is an investigation of the meaning of Being. Three aspects of Heidegger’s investigation soon stood out for me as holding striking relevance for our evolving psychoanalytic phenomenological contextualism. First was his crucial initial move in choosing the inquirer himself/herself as the entity to be interrogated as to its Being. Heidegger reasoned that, because an unarticulated, pre-philosophical understanding of our Being is constitutive of our kind of Being, we humans can investigate our own kind of Being by investigating our understanding of that Being. Accordingly, the investigative method in Being and Time is a phenomenological one, aimed at illuminating the fundamental structures of our understanding of our Being. Just as Faces in a Cloud begins with our investigations of the personal phenomenologies of psychoanalytic theorists en route to a recasting of psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry, Being and Time begins with the phenomenology of the inquirer en route to a claim that ontology is possible only as phenomenology.
Second, Heidegger’s ontological contextualism—his mending of the Cartesian subject-object split with the claim that our Being is always already a Being-in-the-world—immediately struck me as providing a solid philosophical grounding for our psychoanalytic contextualism, replacing the Cartesian isolated mind.
Third and even more important for me at the time, when I read the passages in Being and Time devoted to Heidegger’s existential analysis of Angst, I nearly fell off my chair! Both his phenomenological description and ontological account of Angst bore a remarkable resemblance to what I had concluded about the phenomenology and meaning of emotional trauma some two years earlier. In short, Heidegger’s analysis of Angst, world-collapse, uncanniness, and thrownness into Being-toward-death provided me with extraordinary philosophical tools for grasping the existential significance of emotional trauma. It was this latter discovery that motivated me to begin doctoral studies in philosophy and to write a dissertation and two books (Stolorow 2007, 2011) on Heidegger and what George and I had come to call post-Cartesian psychoanalysis. My dual aim in this work was to show both how Heidegger’s existential philosophy enriches post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and how post-Cartesian psychoanalysis enriches Heidegger’s existential philosophy.
8. George Atwood and Robert Stolorow – The Phenomenological Circle
In the course of our love affairs with philosophy we have sought to refashion psychoanalysis as a phenomenological contextualism that investigates and illuminates worlds of emotional experience, the structures prereflectively organizing them, and the intersubjective contexts in which these structures take form. Such refashioning, in turn, has led us inexorably to a deconstructive critique of psychoanalytic metapsychologies (Atwood & Stolorow, 2014, chapter 8).
We have concluded that psychoanalytic metapsychologies are actually a form of metaphysics, and we have elaborated upon a claim first introduced by Wilhelm Dilthey that metaphysics represents an illusory flight from the tragedy of human finitude. Metaphysics transforms the unbearable fragility and transience of all things human into an enduring, permanent, changeless reality, an illusory world of eternal truths. Using the work and lives of philosophers and psychoanalytic theorists as illustrative “clinical” cases, we have contended that the best safeguard against the pitfalls of metaphysical illusion lies in a shared commitment to reflection upon the phenomenological underpinnings and constitutive contexts of origin of all our theoretical ideas. The growth of our theoretical understanding thus follows an endlessly recurring phenomenological circle joining theoretical perspectives with the inquirers from whose emotional worlds they arise.
REFLECTION AND CONTEXT
In our continuing efforts to explore and illuminate the philosophical assumptions and personal foundations of our proposals for a psychoanalytic phenomenology, we were led to a series of questions.
One of the tasks to be faced in the continuing development of phenomenological contextualism is that of reflecting upon the process of reflection itself. One may ask a number of interrelated questions. What exactly is reflection? What are reflection’s constitutive contexts? What are the constitutive contexts of the idea of a context itself? What precisely is a ‘context,’ and what is meant by describing it as ‘constitutive’? And how do these various issues and our responses to them relate to our own lives and personal subjectivity? In posing such questions, we continue to circle back on our own personal and philosophical foundations.
Here are some of the thoughts that were raised by the posing of these questions.
1. The act of psychoanalytic reflection is always a contextualization. Any experience or action brought into reflective awareness is seen against a certain background of elements in relation to which it is given meaning. That background is the context and forms a grouping of which what is being reflected upon is viewed as a part.
2. Consider the case of interpreting a dream, using the dreamer’s associations to the dream imagery as aids in deciphering initially hidden meanings. By placing the dream’s manifest content within an array of associated thoughts, feelings, and memories, the initially opaque dream experience may be rendered transparent as an organic expression of the dreamer’s subjective life.
3. A constitutive context is a grouping of elements participating in the very being of the object of psychoanalytic reflection. A constitutive context is a part of the world to which that object belongs.
4. There may be more than one context that is constitutive.
5. Identifying the constitutive context(s) of a person’s experiences and actions reunites them with his or her world and overcomes the isolating and fragmenting effects of decontextualization. Inasmuch as personal existence is irreducibly relational and contextual, decontextualization is always also depersonalization. An essential -- perhaps the essential – feature of psychoanalytic therapy is the recontextualization and therefore the repersonalization of the patient’s suffering.
6. One of the constitutive contexts of our emphasis on the central importance of reflection is historical and philosophical – residing in the influence on our thinking of the efforts of the great phenomenological philosophers to bring into reflective awareness the universal structures of human experience. Our concern with personal organizing principles and the critical formative events out of which they crystallize in the life history of the individual is a kind of counterpart to the philosophers’ focus on the preconditions and prereflective organization of experience in general.
7. Another constitutive context of our focus on the discovery of the constitutive contexts illuminated by psychoanalytic reflection is one of very severe trauma in our own personal lives, resulting then in persistent efforts to overcome shattering loss, isolation, and corrosive invalidation.
8. ? – to be continued
REFERENCES
Atwood, G.E. (1983). The pursuit of being in the life and thought of Jean-Paul Sartre. Psychoanalytic Review, 70, 143-162.
Atwood, G.E. (2012). The Abyss of Madness. New York: Routledge.
Atwood, G.E. & Stolorow, R.D. (1984). Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Atwood, G.E. & Stolorow, R.D. (2014). Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology and Contextualism (2nd Edition). New York: Routledge.
Atwood, G.E., Orange, D.M., & Stolorow, R.D. (2002). Shattered worlds/psychotic states. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 19 (2), 281-306.
Atwood, G.E., Stolorow, R.D., & Orange, D.M. (2011). Madness and genius in post-Cartesian philosophy: a distant mirror. Psychoanalytic Review, 98, 263-285.
Binswanger, L. (1946). The existential analysis school of thought, trans. E. Angel. In: Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology, ed. R. May, E. Angel, and H. Ellenberger. New York: Basic Books, 1958, pp. 191-213.
Binswanger, L. (1963). Being-in-the-World. New York: Basic Books.
Boss, M. (1963). Psychoanalysis and Daseinanalysis, trans. L. Lefebre. New York: Basic Books.
Boss, M. (1979). Existential Foundations of Psychology and Medicine. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Des Lauriers, A.M. (1962). The Experience of Reality in Childhood Schizophrenia. New York: International Universities Press.
Gadamer, H.-G. (1975). Truth and Method, 2nd ed., trans. J. Weinsheimer & D. Marshall. New York: Crossroads, 1991.
Golding, S.L., Atwood, G.E., & Goodman, R. (1965). Anxiety and two cognitive forms of resistance to the idea of death. Psychological Reports, 18 (2), 359-364.
Heidegger, M. (1927). Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper and Rowe, 1962.
May, R. (1950). The Meaning of Anxiety. New York: W. W. Norton.
May, R., Angel, E., & Ellenberger, H. (Eds) (1958). Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology. New York: Basic Books.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962.
Shapiro, D. (1965). Neurotic Styles. New York: Basic Books.
Stolorow, R. D. (1969). Anxiety and defense from three perspectives. Psychiatric Quarterly, 43:685-710.
Stolorow, R. D. (1970). Mythic consonance and dissonance in the vicissitudes of transference. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 30: 178-179.
Stolorow, R. D. (1972). On the phenomenology of anger and hate. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 32:218-220.
Stolorow, R. D. (1976). Radical surgery for psychoanalysis. Book review of Psychology versus Metapsychology, ed. M. Gill & P. Hozman. Contemporary Psychology, 21:777-778.
Stolorow, R. D. (1978). The concept of psychic structure: Its metapsychological and clinical psychoanalytic meanings. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 5:313-320.
Stolorow, R.D. (2007). Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections. New York: Routledge.
Stolorow, R.D. (2011). World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.
Stolorow, R.D, & Atwood, G.E. (1979). Faces in a Cloud: Subjectivity in Personality Theory. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Stolorow, R.D. & Atwood, G.E. (1992). Contexts of Being: the Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Life. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
Stolorow, R.D., Atwood, G.E., & Orange, D.M. (2010). Heidegger’s Nazism and the hypostatization of being. International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, 5, 429-450.
ABSTRACT
This paper describes the important role of our deep immersions in philosophy in the development of our phenomenological-contextualist approach to psychoanalysis. Influenced most particularly by the phenomenological movement, our collaborative dialogue over more than 4 decades has led us to a shared commitment to reflection upon the philosophical underpinnings and constitutive contexts of origin of all our theoretical ideas. The growth of our thinking follows an endlessly recurring phenomenological circle joining theoretical perspectives with the inquirers from whose emotional worlds they arise.
George E. Atwood, Ph.D. and Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D.
It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has heretofore been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.—Friedrich Nietzsche
I work concretely and factically out of my ‘I am,’ out of my intellectual and wholly factic origin, milieu, life-contexts, and whatever is available to me from these as a vital experience in which I live.—Martin Heidegger
In what follows, we tell the story of two love affairs with philosophy: first, George Atwood's, and second, Robert Stolorow's. We also describe the interaction of our respective philosophical journeys in our collaborative studies over the last four decades. Our goal in giving this account is to reflect on the deepest assumptions of the phenomenological-contextualist theory to which our shared efforts have led us. Again and again we have been led to the inseparability of theoretical thought and the life in which it emerges.
1. George Atwood
I found philosophy at the age of 16 when I ran across a little book on pragmatism, a work that summarized aspects of the thinking of William James, Charles Sanders Pierce, and John Dewey. I cannot say that I found the ideas in this book terribly exciting in themselves, but I was able to understand them well enough, and there was something about the nature of the thinking described that was utterly entrancing to my young mind. I had discovered philosophy, a field of thought that seemed to be devoted to searching for the ultimate meaning of life and for the universal principles according to which one can and should live. It had not previously occurred to me that such an interesting realm of study even existed.
This first impression became more complex a year later as I began my undergraduate education at the University of Arizona and enrolled in a course in the history of philosophy. I saw to my astonishment that there were whole territories of questions with which philosophers occupied themselves, interesting questions about the nature of reality, the process of knowing, good and evil, mind and body, about the nature of the beautiful, of meaning, of freedom, of truth, and of being itself. The pull was very strong to embrace this incredible discipline, but I was also drawn in a different direction in these early years of my academic studies: toward psychiatry as a career. Concurrently with encountering philosophy, I also discovered psychoanalysis, in the works of Freud and Jung, and was so taken with their discoveries and theories that I decided to follow in their footsteps. This meant undergoing medical training, as they had, then a residency in psychiatry, and eventually becoming a psychotherapist and, I hoped, a theorist of human nature. What career, I asked, could possibly be as good or as interesting? I could dwell for a lifetime in the study of dreams and their symbolism, investigating madness in its many forms and variations, researching the mysteries of human psychological development. Psychoanalysis appeared to me to be a window into the human soul, one that had just begun to be opened by the great theorists of the field. There was a vast country coming into view, and I was to become one of its explorers, a discoverer of continents unknown. And in such exploration, it seemed possible that one might run across the foundational constituents of human nature.
The premedical program at my college was very demanding, and after a few courses I ran into a wall: Organic Chemistry. Picture the following scene: An intensely unhappy 18 year-old George Atwood, in his second semester of this course, clad in a smock and wearing protective goggles, holes in his trousers from an earlier acid spill, utterly exhausted and heavily perspiring, holding up a test tube filled with a foul-smelling black goo. This was the product of 12 consecutive hours of effort to synthesize an organic compound in a process that should have only required perhaps 2 hours. I have forgotten what the target compound was, but it was supposed to appear as a beautiful, light purple powder. And what had I created? Black, stinking goo. It was not the first time my laboratory exercises had ended in such a mess. Words came into my consciousness: I just ain’t cut out for this. Looking ahead to other difficult courses - in biochemistry, physiology, anatomy, and then medical school to be followed by an internship - I shuddered at the thought of the many years of toil that would have to be survived, studying things at a great remove from what had inspired me. So I opted for psychology as a major area of study instead. I imagined psychoanalysis to be a central part of the discipline of psychology, and additionally it seemed to me that psychology overlapped substantially with my beloved philosophy.
Following the path of my subsequent education, undergraduate and graduate, presented new difficulties. The programs at the University of Arizona and subsequently at the University of Oregon were unsympathetic to psychoanalysis and very distant from philosophy, promoting instead behaviorist theories and methods, and insisting on quantitative empirical research. I continued my psychoanalytic education on a separate basis nevertheless, by purchasing and reading the complete works of Freud and Jung, and by collecting and studying major writings of other psychoanalytic theorists as well. Gazing back in time, I see how hard I was trying to somehow fit my psychoanalytic and philosophical interests into the prevailing paradigm of empirical research. My first publication, still as an undergraduate, was a quantitative experiment dealing with the existential philosophical theme of mortality anxiety: “Anxiety and two forms of cognitive resistance to the idea of death” (Golding, Atwood, & Goodman, 1965).
The explorations in philosophy proper also continued. One of my last undergraduate courses, taken in 1965, was in existentialism, and the readings for this course included selections from the book Existence (May, Angel & Ellenberger, 1958). The essays by Rollo May and even more one by Ludwig Binswanger led me then to Martin Heidegger’s (1927) Being and Time. I found Heidegger’s masterwork exceptionally difficult to understand but endlessly fascinating, and I kept a copy of his book at my bedside, for years reading short passages from it almost every night. When I was unable to sleep, I would open it to any random page and peruse the long, often incomprehensible sentences. I also read widely in other philosophers, some of my favorites being Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, and Jean-Paul Sartre. I recall standing for long hours in the stacks of the University of Oregon library reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1945) Phenomenology of Perception, another book that was intriguing but extremely dense and difficult to follow.
Something happened to my mind in consequence of these philosophical readings, especially those in phenomenology. Looking back, it seems to me that this early exposure awakened me from my Cartesian trance. Formerly, without any explicit awareness, I had believed in the existence of the mind, in there being an inner mental life that somehow was separate from a surrounding outer world. I thought people had minds, and that I possessed one too. I remember arguments, some of them heated, with fellow students as I began to question the existence of an “inner world” that exists separately from “external reality.” One of these, a woman with whom I had become personally involved, told me that to question the existence of mind – of an inner mental life that stands apart from the outer world - is like denying that the sun rises in the morning. The thought came to me that her personal reality was split between external and internal, perhaps somehow by trauma, and that she was universalizing her own psychological division by assuming its presence as a given in everyone’s life. Our discussions broke down at this point, as did our personal relationship not long thereafter. In the meantime I had begun to think that there is no such thing as the mind; there is just experience, just consciousness, just the subjective, which is neither internal nor external.
In the meantime I continued to adapt to my academic program, conducting experiments as required, and finally completed a doctoral degree. What followed was a post-doctoral fellowship in clinical psychology at the Western Missouri Mental Health Center in Kansas City, under the guiding supervision of Austin Des Lauriers, the author of The Experience of Reality in Childhood Schizophrenia (1964). Des Lauriers was my first great mentor figure, and he was a phenomenologist. His theory of the central disturbance constituting so-called schizophrenia was that it involves a loss of reality experience, i.e., a loss of the sense that anything is real, substantial, enduring, and a consequent devastation of the experience of selfhood as it loses its boundaries, cohesion, and continuity in time.
My postdoctoral years, occupied primarily with working on an inpatient service for very severe psychiatric disorders, were decisive in shaping my destiny as a clinician and as a theorist. I gave myself unreservedly to the work, spending up to 70 hours a week at the hospital, getting to know a great many of the patients not formally assigned to me and taking voluminous notes on all my experiences. Under my mentor’s influence, I tried to focus on understanding the patients I met phenomenologically, in terms of what their experiences were as best I could make them out. Some of these experiences I had never encountered before, and when I tried to find sense in what was being said to me in terms of the many theories I had studied, I got nowhere. I recall hearing from a number of people, for example, that the world had come to an end and that they were dead rather than alive. How, I wondered, would Freud, or Jung, or Sullivan, or any of a whole range of other theorists interpret such expressions? The regular psychiatric staff members at the hospital viewed these statements as delusional, as symptoms of an underlying psychosis that was causing the patients to lose contact with the objectively real. This way of thinking seemed utterly, woefully inadequate. I met other patients who made the claim to be God, to be the savior of the universe, and still others who told me that I was God and had the power to set all things in the world straight and right. I had an event occur on the very first day of my postdoctoral work that set me reeling: as I walked out of the elevator and on to the floor where the patients were housed, a very tall and heavy bipolar patient threw herself upon me and attempted to engage in sexual intercourse. One of the first to tell me she was dead, as we sat in an office for our interview, lit a cigarette I gave her and pressed its burning tip into the flesh on her arm as she looked into my eyes and smiled warmly. I remember another young man I met in this very early period who was silent for long periods, not responding to my queries and not looking at me as I tried to engage him – finally he spoke, saying that he was hearing a voice saying “Kill Dr. Atwood.” A woman, 60 years old, was brought to the hospital by the Secret Service after attempting to break into the home of ex-President Harry Truman, then still alive and residing nearby. She said that she had traveled to his home to retrieve her head, which had been stolen from her and placed under his control as part of a terrible conspiracy. A young woman I eventually worked closely with for many years introduced herself to me one evening with the claim that she had just experienced sexual intercourse with Jesus Christ. It was like that – case after case, one incomprehensible story after another, one strange pattern of behavior followed by another one, and all with no explanations and nothing in my background to help me begin to know what it was I was seeing. Although I had earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, I saw that I knew nothing and had to forget all I had learned in my so-called education and start over again, from scratch. I recognized that the nurses and the aides and even the cleaning staff at the hospital, those who pushed the brooms and took care of the laundry, were way ahead of me. They had seen and known these patients for years, and were on familiar terms with things that I was encountering for the very first time in my life.
My appreciation of phenomenology increased dramatically because of these and other such continuing challenging experiences. Phenomenology itself is always trying to start over again, to find the requisite starting point from which to approach the task of describing and understanding subjectivity. With sustaining support from Austin Des Lauriers, it became possible to embrace the task of my own new beginning, with the goal of discovering the meaning of the many forms of madness by which I was confronted. How did I know there were meanings there to be found? In accord with the entire enterprise of psychoanalytic theory, I made the assumption that this was so, and went on from there.
From my point of view now, gazing back in time, I think I understand an important part of my difficulty in applying the psychoanalytic concepts I had studied. I did not know it at the time, but it was because of a profound disjunction between the philosophical assumptions underlying the theoretical systems I was trying to use, and the nature of the extreme psychological disturbances with which I was beginning to engage. Here is how I put it in a paper, coauthored by my colleagues Robert Stolorow and Donna Orange, some 30 years later.
“…the experiences that characterize these psychological disturbances tend to cluster around themes of personal annihilation and the destruction of the world. Such experiences occur outside the horizons of Cartesian systems of thought, which rest upon a vision of the mind as an isolated existent that stands in relation to a stable, external reality. The Cartesian image of mind, rigidly separating an internal mental subject from an externally real object, reifies and universalizes a very specific pattern of experience, centering around an enduringly stable sense of personal selfhood that is felt as distinct and separate from a world outside. Experiences of extreme self-loss and the disintegration of the world cannot be conceptualized within such an ontology of mind, because they dissolve the very structures this ontology posits as universally constitutive of personal existence” (Atwood, Orange, & Stolorow, 2002, p. 144).
In the early years I am describing, I was unable to articulate any of this and certainly could not theoretically conceptualize my patients’ psychological situations; but I found it possible nevertheless to relate to them on a practical level and discuss with them all they were undergoing. When people told me they were dead because someone had drained their bodies of all their blood, I heard what had been said not as delusion but just as experience, one of infinite devitalization. Similarly, if I was told that I possessed godlike powers, I believed this was what was being felt - George Atwood, creating (and perhaps destroying) personal universes. When someone explained to me that his wife and child had been replaced by persecuting duplicates, I did not pronounce his thoughts to be insane. Instead I just listened to him, and wondered about the overall calamity that had befallen him, when his most intimate family members could no longer be relied upon even to be themselves. If I met a person whose body was covered with scars from years and even decades of self-cutting, I did not diagnose the presence of so-called borderline personality disorder. Instead I tried to decipher the messages to the world that the scars from the cuts were trying to send forth. In other words, I was searching for a human understanding of each and every patient I met, and simultaneously for a set of guiding ideas to draw upon to support that search.
There was one indelible impression I took away from my postdoctoral years. It concerned the healing power of psychotherapy in the most severe psychological disturbances. Working intensively with a number of patients, guided by indispensable consultations with Des Lauriers, I saw with my own eyes dramatic recoveries from chronic mental illnesses arising out of a human intervention. Such experiences laid the foundation for a deep optimism that I have brought to all my subsequent clinical work.
2. Robert Stolorow
I first touched on the edges of philosophy at the age of 13 when I read a book on the life and work of Albert Einstein, which eventually became the topic of my high school senior thesis. Foreshadowing my later career as a subversive thinker, I scandalized the congregation with my Bar Mitzvah sermon on Einstein’s conception of God as an impersonal principle of order in the universe.
Influenced by my father’s admiration of philosophy, as an undergraduate at Harvard I eagerly took courses in Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Ethics, Augustine’s Confessions, aesthetics, and intellectual history. A nodal point occurred when, in Gordon Allport’s course in personality psychology, I encountered Rollo May’s book, Existence. Like George, I became fascinated with the thought of Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Binswanger.
Despite my interest in philosophy, I formed an interest in doing hard-science research in psychopathology and decided that the best path toward that ambition was medical school and psychiatry. I enrolled at Cornell Medical School in the fall of 1964, but I was a very unhappy camper there and dropped out after 5 weeks, deciding that the most appropriate path for my goal was doctoral studies in clinical psychology, which I pursued back at Harvard the next year. Paralleling George’s disaster in organic chemistry lab, my own performance in anatomy lab was so atrocious that I think it is safe to say that many lives have been saved as a result of taking a scalpel out of my hands. The year before beginning graduate work at Harvard proved pivotal, as I enrolled in a course at the New School on existential psychology given by Rollo May. I was entranced by May’s lectures on phenomenology and existential philosophy—the works of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. I also read May’s (1950) book, The Meaning of Anxiety, which introduced me to the concept of ontological anxiety, a concept that was to become very important to me in later years. The following year in a seminar given by Robert White I wrote a term paper exploring the anxiety-defense process from three perspectives—the intrapsychic, the interpersonal, and the ontological—which became my first published article (Stolorow, 1969).
As a doctoral student in clinical psychology I soon became disillusioned with empirical psychological research, feeling that it stripped psychology of everything humanly meaningful. I contacted a former undergraduate professor, Henry Aiken, then at Brandeis University, and proposed doing a second doctorate in philosophy, with an eye toward using phenomenology and existential philosophy to clean up the mess of psychoanalytic theory. Aiken was enthusiastic about my proposal, but during my subsequent clinical internship I found that I really enjoyed psychoanalytic work and, after completing my doctorate in psychology, I decided to go to New York to pursue psychoanalytic training instead. My idea of pursuing doctoral studies in philosophy had to await several decades before coming to fruition.
Like George, I early on became interested in the phenomenological underpinnings of clinical phenomena. Drawing on David Shapiro’s (1965) concept of neurotic styles, my doctoral dissertation examined the differing causality-intepretations characteristic of obsessive versus hysterical styles, with the former showing an exaggerated sense and the latter an attenuated sense of personal causation. In my first year of psychoanalytic training I published a brief article, “Mythic Consonance and Dissonance in the Vicissitudes of Transference” (Stolorow, 1970), exploring the impact on the therapeutic relationship of correspondences and discrepancies between the causality-interpretations of patient and therapist. This early article anticipated our later conception of the therapeutic relationship as an intersubjective system. Two years later I published another brief article whose title explicitly named phenomenology—“On the Phenomenology of Anger and Hate” (Stolorow, 1972), exploring how the experience of these emotions differs depending on whether forgiveness is felt to be a possibility.
Early in my psychoanalytic training I also became interested in Heinz Kohut’s (1966, 1968) work on narcissism and the treatment of narcissistic disorders. It seemed to me that hidden within Kohut’s obscure drive-theoretical language—the language of the Freudian orthodoxy against which I was already in vigorous rebellion—were important insights into the relationships that either fostered or undermined the senses of self-cohesion, self-continuity, and self-esteem. What was crystallizing for me here was a focus on emotional phenomenology and its intersubjective contexts, which would soon become the joint preoccupation of our collaborative work. Foreshadowing my later preoccupation with emotional trauma and efforts to rethink the concept of the unconscious, my first psychoanalytic control case was a very successful treatment of a woman whose sense of self had been massively damaged by her ways of denying an early devastating traumatic loss.
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By the time we met at Rutgers in 1972 and began our long collaborative dialogue, we had arrived at similar positions of profound dissatisfaction with the prevailing frameworks of our field and their official languages—those of traditional diagnostic psychiatry in the case of George and that of Freudian metapsychology in that of my own. In each instance, the prevailing framework and language seemed to alienate us from the very experiences we wished to engage and understand. We each sensed the need for a framework that was always and only about emotional experience and how it came to be shaped. We were ripe for a collaborative effort at creating a psychoanalytic phenomenology.
3. George Atwood
Robert Stolorow and I met in the spring of 1972, when he was offered a faculty position at Rutgers University. At the time, an effort was being made to assemble a group of scholars at Rutgers, under the leadership of Silvan Tomkins, to resurrect the personological tradition in psychology that originally had been associated with Henry Murray at Harvard University. This tradition is defined by its central methodology: the intensive, in-depth case study, providing an alternative to the emphasis of academic psychology on quantification and objective empirical research. I called Bob and urged him to accept the offer that had been made, telling him he would be insane to go anywhere else. I told him that in our working together there was the possibility of significant advances in the sort of personality theory to which both of us were already deeply committed. He accepted the offer and our collaboration began.
There were many wonderful lunchtime conversations over cheeseburgers and endless cups of coffee in the first and second years of our relationship. We discussed anything and everything about personality psychology – its past, present, and future. In one of these early talks, as I recall it – now more than 4 decades later – a question was posed: “What is the most important problem facing the field of personality theory today?” One of us – I no longer remember which one -- offered a succinct answer: “That would be the problem of understanding the dimensionalization of a person’s experiential world.” The use of the term world reflected already our shared background and interest in existential phenomenology and foreshadowed much that was to come in the many years of our work that followed. The word dimensionalization in this phrasing, influenced to some degree by the thinking of Silvan Tomkins, was intended to capture the idea that every person’s world has its own unique emotional geometry, rendered visible in repeating, invariant patterns of experience and conduct.
In another of these initial conversations, an idea was floated bearing similarity to the one just described. We were talking about Bob’s psychoanalytic training in New York City at the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health, then in its final stages. The role of the so-called structural model in that training came up in our discussion, the tripartite division of the mind into ego, id, and superego. I remember Bob describing how this conceptualization had been taught as if “this is just the way human beings come packaged;” in other words, as a universally valid description of the mind. I responded: “Perhaps though the tripartite model is not universal but is just a symbol, one that points to an important but still particular class of conflictual experiential states.” Implicit here was an incompletely developed intuition that some personal worlds of emotional experience might be organized or structured along the Freudian lines, but that very different models of he mind might apply to other such worlds. We were beginning to imagine the existence of a wide range of variations and were also starting to see that different schools of thought in psychoanalytic personality theory somehow corresponded to these differing variations. What was not apparent, however, was how to move toward a more comprehensive psychoanalytic phenomenology, a more general framework addressing personal worlds in all their diversity, richness, and idiosyncrasy.
Soon thereafter, however, an approach to this problem opened up to us, in our collaborative studies of the subjectivity of personality theory. We saw that each of the classic schools of psychoanalytic thought had its own central affective theme, and that this theme was also the organizing emotional dimension of the theorist’s personal world. An analysis of the personal subjectivity of these various frameworks we began to recognize opened a pathway to a more general point of view: in Bob’s words, “a movement from studies of the subjectivity of theory to a theory of subjectivity itself.“ Our first book, Faces in a Cloud: Subjectivity in Personality Theory (Stolorow & Atwood, 1979) was an effort to follow this pathway and reach toward an embracing psychoanalytic phenomenology.
4. Robert Stolorow
In these early years of our collaboration the philosophy that attracted my interest largely took the form of George S. Klein’s brilliant work on the nature of psychoanalytic theory. Klein (1976) claimed that Freud’s psychoanalytic theory actually amalgamates two theories—a metapsychology and a clinical theory—deriving from two different universes of discourse. Metapsychology (which we eventually recognized as a form of metaphysics) deals with the material substrate of experience and is couched in the natural science framework of impersonal structures, forces, and energies. Clinical theory, by contrast, deals with intentionality and the unconscious meanings of personal experience, seen from the perspective of the individual’s unique life history. Clinical psychoanalysis asks “why” questions and seeks answers in terms of personal reasons, purposes, and individual meanings. Metapsychology asks “how” questions and seeks answers in terms of the nonexperiential realm of impersonal mechanisms and causes. Klein sought to disentangle metapsychological and clinical concepts, retaining only the latter as the legitimate content of psychoanalytic theory. For Klein, the essential psychoanalytic enterprise involves the reading of disclaimed intentionality and the unlocking of unconscious meanings from a person’s experience, a task for which the concepts of the clinical theory, purged of metapsychological contaminants, are uniquely suited.
Although Klein did not chronicle the philosophical traditions that informed his proposal for a radical “theorectomy” for psychoanalysis, he had unveiled its clinical essence as a hermeneutic phenomenology devoted to the investigation of the meanings that unconsciously shape experiential life. I was so taken with his proposal that I agreed to review an anthology of articles about it for Contemporary Psychology (Stolorow, 1976). Much more important for the evolution of our own theoretical framework, I wrote an article, “The Concept of Psychic Structure: Its Metapsychological and Clinical Psychoanalytic Meanings” (Stolorow, 1978), applying Klein’s distinction to the psychoanalytic concept of psychological structure. I suggested that, in contrast to metapsychological structures like id, ego, and superego, in its clinical psychoanalytic meanings psychological structure denotes the principles that prereflecively organize an experiential world. With this conception of psychological structure, psychoanalysis became a form of inquiry explicitly rooted in the tradition of Continental phenomenology, investigating prereflective structures of experience.
5. George Atwood and Robert Stolorow
Our second book, Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology (Atwood & Stolorow, 1984), included 3 developments in our ever-evolving interaction with philosophy. First, we offered a more detailed explication of our own philosophical premises in fashioning a phenomenological reconceptualization of psychoanalytic theory.
“The point of departure of psychoanalytic phenomenology is the concept of [the person as] an experiencing subject. This means that at the deepest level of our theoretical constructionso we are operating within a sphere of subjectivity, abjuring assumptions that reduce experience to a material substrate. The material world, from our standpoint, is regarded as a domain of experience, and the concepts of natural science are understood as modes of organizing that domain of experience. This is in contrast to a theoretical [and philosophical] position that would assign ontological priority to physical matter and interpret human consciousness as a secondary expression of material events. The development of knowledge in the sciences of nature involves the organizing and interconnecting of human observations, which are experiences; but materialism is a doctrine based on reifying the concepts of natural science and then seeing consciousness as an epiphenomenon of those reifications” (Atwood & Stolorow, 1984, p. 7)
The second development in our relationship with philosophy occurring at the time appeared in a systematic comparison of our emerging ideas with those of 3 great phenomenologists: Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Although we were still picturing psychoanalytic investigation as distinct from philosophical inquiry, we sought to define the essential similarities and differences of philosophical and psychoanalytic phenomenology.
“Each of the 3 phenomenological systems reviewed … is a proposal concerning the assumptions underlying the study of human experience. These proposals have in common an emphasis on differentiating between the properties of material objects in the world of experience and the properties of subjectivity itself. This same emphasis has been of growing importance in recent psychoanalytic thought, specifically in the critique of Freudian metapsychology. It seems to us that this agreement establishes the possibility of an integration of phenomenological insight into psychoanalysis” (Atwood & Stolorow, 1984, p. 30).
We noted two obstacles to such integration: the commitment of analysts to a vision of their field modeled on the sciences of material nature, enshrined in the metaphorical language of classical metapsychology, picturing mental life in terms of forces, energies, and mechanisms; and an insufficiently critical attitude toward the phenomenological philosophers themselves.
“Many exceptional thinkers have tried to restructure the assumptions of psychoanalysis along phenomenological lines (e.g., Binswanger, 1963; Boss, 1963, 1979; May, Angel, & Ellenberger, 1958). We are in sympathy with such reformulations, insofar as their aim has been to free the phenomenological knowledge of psychoanalysis from its procrustean bed of mechanism and determinism” (Atwood & Stolorow, 1984, p. 31).
Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss, for example, were two early pioneers who saw the value of Heidegger’s analysis of existence for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. They both proceeded “from the top down”—that is, they started with Heidegger’s philosophical delineation of essential existential structures and applied these to clinical phenomena and the therapeutic situation. Although Binswanger’s (1946) existential analysis produced some brilliant phenomenological descriptions of the “world-designs” (p. 195) underlying various forms of psychopathology, and Boss’s (1963) Daseinanalysis freed the psychoanalytic theory of therapy from the dehumanizing causal-mechanistic assumptions of Freudian metapsychology, neither effort brought about a radicalization of psychoanalytic practice itself or of the psychoanalytic process. The evolution of our own psychoanalytic perspective, by contrast, proceeded “from the bottom up.” It was born of our studies of the subjective origins of psychoanalytic theories and developed out of our concurrent efforts to rethink psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry and to illuminate the phenomenology of the psychoanalytic process itself.
This relates to the third of the developments in our understanding of the relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy. The proposals of philosophical phenomenology, we came to realize, arise out of the solitary reflections of individual persons and inevitably embody a particularization of scope associated with the philosopher’s personal subjectivity. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein, and Sartre’s dialectic of being and nothingness each carry the unmistakable signature of its creator’s unique personality. The philosophical systems have a metaphysical-ontological core, and as we had shown to be the case in our studies of the personality theorists in Faces in a Cloud, this universalizing core reflects and symbolizes the issues and struggles of the philosopher’s personal existence. Analyzing the philosophical thinking in its individual subjective context seemed to be of assistance in clarifying the limits to generality of the philosophical ideas as foundational for a science of experience, and thus in pointing beyond their particular horizons of applicability. We were beginning to see the rich potential of what later we called “the reciprocity between the philosophy of psychoanalysis and the psychoanalysis of philosophy” (Atwood, Stolorow, & Orange, 2011).
6. George Atwood
Commencing in 1980, I taught a seminar for college seniors at Rutgers University entitled Madness and Creative Genius. This class continued to be offered over a period of 24 years. Each year my students and I selected a figure from philosophy, literature, or psychology, who engaged in works of great creativity but whose life also showed signs of madness. Our goal in each instance was to understand the relationship between the madness and the genius. Among the many creators we studied were Carl Gustav Jung, Sylvia Plath, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, Jacques Derrida, Heinz Kohut, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Each study involved an immersion in the most important works of the figure selected and a sustained collaborative effort to relate the major themes of his or her writings to the context of the creator’s life history. I regard the influence of these absorbing explorations on my own thinking to have been profound, opening my mind to an ever-expanding and deepening knowledge of creativity and its richly varied linkages to the psychological catastrophes that may occur in a human life. Unexpectedly, my ongoing clinical practice as a psychotherapist interacted powerfully with the research conducted in my seminars. Again and again I found that what I was learning in my practice working with very severe emotional disturbances was applicable to the studies of the geniuses; correspondingly, insights achieved in the analyses of the creators I discovered helped me in understanding my most challenging patients (Atwood, 2012).
All of these intellectual journeys were of importance, but possibly the most transforming for me personally and for the continuing shared work with Bob were the studies of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Sartre. In 2002 we had discussions about the significance of an understanding of these philosophers for our own continuing efforts to formulate a psychoanalytic phenomenology. Over the decade of the 1990s, we had become aware of the pervasiveness of the doctrine of the Cartesian isolated mind in psychoanalysis. We took the view that this doctrine was a modern myth (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992), to be overcome by an increasingly radical phenomenological-contextualist way of thinking about the nature of psychoanalytic theory and therapy. The particular philosophers just listed were, like us, rebels against Descartes, and we knew we had already been drawing on their thought in our own efforts across the years. An idea came to us that a way of further advancing our own understanding would be to examine these post-Cartesian geniuses psychologically and to identify the personal sources and meanings of their various departures from the Cartesian legacy. It seemed to us that we might use their personal life journeys as a distant mirror in which we could glimpse the meanings of our own passionate quest for a truly post-Cartesian psychoanalysis.
For a decade or more we tossed around the possibility of such a project and finally it came together in our paper, “The Madness and Genius of Post-Cartesian Philosophy: A Distant Mirror” (Atwood, Stolorow, & Orange, 2011). Drawing on the discoveries that occurred in my seminar, and on years of intensive discussions between us that also included Donna Orange and a collaborative investigation of Heidegger’s fall into Nazism (Stolorow, Atwood, & Orange, 2010), here is what we found.
“Each [of the post-Cartesian philosophers] suffered extreme trauma in his personal world, eventuating in a lifelong struggle with profound inner conflict. Their thinking, in addition to being brilliant and innovative, also in each instance embodied an effort to master or otherwise come to terms with persistent emotional tensions presenting the danger of fragmentation. We found madness in the genius of their works, arising from the tragic, disintegrating, and even annihilating conditions dominating their life histories. There were personal demons with which they fought, often ambivalently and with uneven success, and the intellectual journeys for which they are famous dramatically reflect and symbolize their efforts to bring themselves together and emotionally survive” (Atwood & Stolorow, 2014, p. 111; see also Atwood, 1983).
Gazing into the mirror of the philosophers’ life histories, we were then led to reflections on our own demons, on the personal contexts and sources of our interests in developing an embracing phenomenological contextualism.
“Perhaps not surprisingly, we saw more clearly the power of trauma in each of our lives, including experiences of shattering loss, of tyrannical invalidation, and personal fragmentation. We also began to recognize all the ways that intersubjectivity theory constituted a kind of answer to the events and circumstances that had been most difficult. The theory that is our Holy Grail … seeks victory over demonic forces that tear us away from ourselves and each other, that confront us with crushing definitions of who we are and should be, and that threaten the survival of our very subjectivity as experiencing persons” (Atwood & Stolorow, 2014, p. 111).
7. Robert Stolorow
My studies in Continental phenomenology, along with further developments of my psychoanalytic perspective, were spurred by terrible personal tragedy.
When the book Contexts of Being (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992) was first published, an initial batch of copies was sent "hot‑off‑the‑press" to the display table at a conference where I was a panelist. I picked up a copy and looked around excitedly for my late wife, Dede, who would be so pleased and happy to see it. She was, of course, nowhere to be found, having died some 20 months earlier. I had awakened one morning to find her lying dead across our bed, four weeks after her metastatic cancer had been diagnosed. I spent the remainder of that conference in 1992 remembering and grieving, consumed with feelings of horror and sorrow over what had happened to Dede and to me.
There was a dinner at that conference for all the panelists, many of whom were my old and good friends and close colleagues. Yet, as I looked around the ballroom, they all seemed like strange and alien beings to me. Or more accurately, I seemed like a strange and alien being--not of this world. The others seemed so vitalized, engaged with one another in a lively manner. I, in contrast, felt deadened and broken, a shell of the man I had once been. An unbridgeable gulf seemed to open up, separating me forever from my friends and colleagues. They could never even begin to fathom my experience, I thought to myself, because we now lived in altogether different worlds.
Over the course of six years following that painful occasion, I tried to understand and conceptualize the dreadful sense of estrangement and isolation that seemed to me to be inherent to the experience of emotional trauma. I became aware that this sense of alienation and aloneness appears as a common theme in the trauma literature, and I was able to hear about it from many of my patients who had experienced severe traumatization. One such young man, who had suffered multiple losses of beloved family members during his childhood and adulthood, told me that the world was divided into two groups‑‑the normals and the traumatized ones. There was no possibility, he said, for a normal ever to grasp the experience of a traumatized one. I remembered how important it had been to me to believe that the analyst I saw after Dede’s death was also a person who had known devastating loss, and how I implored her not to say anything that could disabuse me of my belief.
How was this experiential chasm separating the traumatized person from other human beings to be understood? In the chapter on trauma that I had written for Contexts of Being, I contended that the essence of emotional trauma lay in the experience of unbearable affect and that, developmentally, such intolerability is constituted within an intersubjective system characterized by massive malattunement to the child’s emotional pain. In my experience, this conceptualization of developmental trauma as a relational process involving malattunement to painful affect has proven to be of enormous clinical value in the treatment of traumatized patients. Yet, as I began to recognize at that conference dinner, this formulation fails to distinguish between an attunement that cannot be supplied by others and an attunement that cannot be felt by the traumatized person, because of the profound sense of singularity that seemed to me to be built in to the experience of trauma itself. A beginning comprehension of this isolating estrangement came from an unexpected source: the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose work I had begun to read.
Concerned as it is with the nature of understanding, philosophical hermeneutics has immediate relevance for the profound despair about having one’s experience understood that lies at the heart of emotional trauma. Axiomatic for Gadamer (1975) is the proposition that all understanding involves interpretation. Interpretation, in turn, can only be from a perspective embedded in the historical matrix of the interpreter’s own traditions. Understanding, therefore, is always from a perspective whose horizons are delimited by the historicity of the interpreter’s organizing principles, by the fabric of preconceptions that Gadamer calls prejudice. Gadamer illustrates his hermeneutical philosophy by applying it to the anthropological problem of attempting to understand an alien culture in which the forms of social life, the horizons of experience, are incommensurable with those of the investigator.
At some point while studying Gadamer’s work, I recalled my feeling at the conference dinner as though I were an alien to the normals around me. The two “hermeneutical situations” seemed analogous to me: I felt as though I lived in a world alien to that of my friends and colleagues. In Gadamer’s terms, I felt certain that the horizons of their experience could never encompass mine, and this conviction was the source of my alienation and solitude, of the unbridgeable gulf that I believed separated me from their understanding. It is not just that the traumatized ones and the normals live in different worlds, I thought; it is that these discrepant worlds are felt by the traumatized person to be essentially and ineradicably incommensurable.
Some six years after the conference dinner I heard something in a lecture delivered by George that helped me to comprehend further the nature of this felt incommensurability. In the course of discussing the clinical implications of an intersubjective contextualism from which Cartesian objectivism had been expunged, George offered a nonobjectivist, dialogic definition of psychotic delusions: "Delusions are ideas whose validity is not open for discussion.” This definition fit well with a proposal we had made a dozen years earlier that, when a child's perceptual and emotional experiences meet with massive and consistent invalidation, then his or her belief in the reality of such experiences will remain unsteady and vulnerable to dissolution, and further, that under such predisposing circumstances delusional ideas may develop that “serve to dramatize and reify [an] endangered psychic reality ... restoring [the] vanishing belief in its validity" (Stolorow, Brandchaft, & Atwood, 1987, p. 133). Delusional ideas were understood as a form of absolutism--a radical decontextualization serving vital restorative and defensive functions. Experiences that are insulated from dialogue cannot be challenged or invalidated.
After hearing George's presentation, I began to think about the role such absolutisms unconsciously play in everyday life. When a person says to a friend, "I'll see you later,” or a parent says to a child at bedtime, "I'll see you in the morning,” these are statements, like delusions, whose validity is not open for discussion. Such absolutisms are the basis for a kind of naive realism and optimism that allow one to function in the world, experienced as stable, predictable, and safe. It is in the essence of emotional trauma, I concluded, that it shatters these absolutisms, a catastrophic loss of innocence that permanently alters one's sense of being‑in‑the‑world. Massive deconstruction of the absolutisms of everyday life exposes the inescapable contingency of existence on a universe that is chaotic and unpredictable and in which no safety or continuity of being can be assured. Trauma thereby exposes “the unbearable embeddedness of being" (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992, p. 22). As a result, the traumatized person cannot help but perceive aspects of existence that lie well outside the absolutized horizons of normal everydayness. It is in this sense that the worlds of traumatized persons are felt to be fundamentally incommensurable with those of others, the deep chasm in which an anguished sense of estrangement and solitude takes form.
Motivated in part by how beneficial Gadamer’s work had been for understanding my traumatized state, I turned at this point to more systematic studies of philosophical texts. In the year 2000 I formed a leaderless philosophical reading group that ran for two years, the first of which was devoted to a close reading of Heidegger’s (1927) Being and Time. This study of Heidegger proved to be pivotal for me.
Being and Time is an investigation of the meaning of Being. Three aspects of Heidegger’s investigation soon stood out for me as holding striking relevance for our evolving psychoanalytic phenomenological contextualism. First was his crucial initial move in choosing the inquirer himself/herself as the entity to be interrogated as to its Being. Heidegger reasoned that, because an unarticulated, pre-philosophical understanding of our Being is constitutive of our kind of Being, we humans can investigate our own kind of Being by investigating our understanding of that Being. Accordingly, the investigative method in Being and Time is a phenomenological one, aimed at illuminating the fundamental structures of our understanding of our Being. Just as Faces in a Cloud begins with our investigations of the personal phenomenologies of psychoanalytic theorists en route to a recasting of psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry, Being and Time begins with the phenomenology of the inquirer en route to a claim that ontology is possible only as phenomenology.
Second, Heidegger’s ontological contextualism—his mending of the Cartesian subject-object split with the claim that our Being is always already a Being-in-the-world—immediately struck me as providing a solid philosophical grounding for our psychoanalytic contextualism, replacing the Cartesian isolated mind.
Third and even more important for me at the time, when I read the passages in Being and Time devoted to Heidegger’s existential analysis of Angst, I nearly fell off my chair! Both his phenomenological description and ontological account of Angst bore a remarkable resemblance to what I had concluded about the phenomenology and meaning of emotional trauma some two years earlier. In short, Heidegger’s analysis of Angst, world-collapse, uncanniness, and thrownness into Being-toward-death provided me with extraordinary philosophical tools for grasping the existential significance of emotional trauma. It was this latter discovery that motivated me to begin doctoral studies in philosophy and to write a dissertation and two books (Stolorow 2007, 2011) on Heidegger and what George and I had come to call post-Cartesian psychoanalysis. My dual aim in this work was to show both how Heidegger’s existential philosophy enriches post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and how post-Cartesian psychoanalysis enriches Heidegger’s existential philosophy.
8. George Atwood and Robert Stolorow – The Phenomenological Circle
In the course of our love affairs with philosophy we have sought to refashion psychoanalysis as a phenomenological contextualism that investigates and illuminates worlds of emotional experience, the structures prereflectively organizing them, and the intersubjective contexts in which these structures take form. Such refashioning, in turn, has led us inexorably to a deconstructive critique of psychoanalytic metapsychologies (Atwood & Stolorow, 2014, chapter 8).
We have concluded that psychoanalytic metapsychologies are actually a form of metaphysics, and we have elaborated upon a claim first introduced by Wilhelm Dilthey that metaphysics represents an illusory flight from the tragedy of human finitude. Metaphysics transforms the unbearable fragility and transience of all things human into an enduring, permanent, changeless reality, an illusory world of eternal truths. Using the work and lives of philosophers and psychoanalytic theorists as illustrative “clinical” cases, we have contended that the best safeguard against the pitfalls of metaphysical illusion lies in a shared commitment to reflection upon the phenomenological underpinnings and constitutive contexts of origin of all our theoretical ideas. The growth of our theoretical understanding thus follows an endlessly recurring phenomenological circle joining theoretical perspectives with the inquirers from whose emotional worlds they arise.
REFLECTION AND CONTEXT
In our continuing efforts to explore and illuminate the philosophical assumptions and personal foundations of our proposals for a psychoanalytic phenomenology, we were led to a series of questions.
One of the tasks to be faced in the continuing development of phenomenological contextualism is that of reflecting upon the process of reflection itself. One may ask a number of interrelated questions. What exactly is reflection? What are reflection’s constitutive contexts? What are the constitutive contexts of the idea of a context itself? What precisely is a ‘context,’ and what is meant by describing it as ‘constitutive’? And how do these various issues and our responses to them relate to our own lives and personal subjectivity? In posing such questions, we continue to circle back on our own personal and philosophical foundations.
Here are some of the thoughts that were raised by the posing of these questions.
1. The act of psychoanalytic reflection is always a contextualization. Any experience or action brought into reflective awareness is seen against a certain background of elements in relation to which it is given meaning. That background is the context and forms a grouping of which what is being reflected upon is viewed as a part.
2. Consider the case of interpreting a dream, using the dreamer’s associations to the dream imagery as aids in deciphering initially hidden meanings. By placing the dream’s manifest content within an array of associated thoughts, feelings, and memories, the initially opaque dream experience may be rendered transparent as an organic expression of the dreamer’s subjective life.
3. A constitutive context is a grouping of elements participating in the very being of the object of psychoanalytic reflection. A constitutive context is a part of the world to which that object belongs.
4. There may be more than one context that is constitutive.
5. Identifying the constitutive context(s) of a person’s experiences and actions reunites them with his or her world and overcomes the isolating and fragmenting effects of decontextualization. Inasmuch as personal existence is irreducibly relational and contextual, decontextualization is always also depersonalization. An essential -- perhaps the essential – feature of psychoanalytic therapy is the recontextualization and therefore the repersonalization of the patient’s suffering.
6. One of the constitutive contexts of our emphasis on the central importance of reflection is historical and philosophical – residing in the influence on our thinking of the efforts of the great phenomenological philosophers to bring into reflective awareness the universal structures of human experience. Our concern with personal organizing principles and the critical formative events out of which they crystallize in the life history of the individual is a kind of counterpart to the philosophers’ focus on the preconditions and prereflective organization of experience in general.
7. Another constitutive context of our focus on the discovery of the constitutive contexts illuminated by psychoanalytic reflection is one of very severe trauma in our own personal lives, resulting then in persistent efforts to overcome shattering loss, isolation, and corrosive invalidation.
8. ? – to be continued
REFERENCES
Atwood, G.E. (1983). The pursuit of being in the life and thought of Jean-Paul Sartre. Psychoanalytic Review, 70, 143-162.
Atwood, G.E. (2012). The Abyss of Madness. New York: Routledge.
Atwood, G.E. & Stolorow, R.D. (1984). Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Atwood, G.E. & Stolorow, R.D. (2014). Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology and Contextualism (2nd Edition). New York: Routledge.
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ABSTRACT
This paper describes the important role of our deep immersions in philosophy in the development of our phenomenological-contextualist approach to psychoanalysis. Influenced most particularly by the phenomenological movement, our collaborative dialogue over more than 4 decades has led us to a shared commitment to reflection upon the philosophical underpinnings and constitutive contexts of origin of all our theoretical ideas. The growth of our thinking follows an endlessly recurring phenomenological circle joining theoretical perspectives with the inquirers from whose emotional worlds they arise.